I am a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Princeton University, advised by Karthik Narasimhan. Previously, I graduated from Yao Class at Tsinghua University.

My research interests include language, games, representation learning, cognitive science, and AI in general.

My personal interests include reading, basketball, travel, and rap.

Papers

• Self-Attention Networks Can Process Bounded Hierarchical Languages. Shunyu Yao, Binghui Peng, Christos Papadimitriou, Karthik Narasimhan. ACL 2021. [pdf] [code]

• Reading and Acting while Blindfolded: The Need for Semantics in Text Game Agents. Shunyu Yao, Karthik Narasimhan, Matthew Hausknecht. NAACL 2021. [pdf] [code] [project]

• Keep CALM and Explore: Language Models for Action Generation in Text-based Games. Shunyu Yao, Rohan Rao, Matthew Hausknecht, Karthik Narasimhan. EMNLP 2020. [pdf] [code]

• The Fine Structure of Surprise in Intuitive Physics: When, Why, and How Much?. Kevin Smith, Lingjie Mei, Shunyu Yao, Jiajun Wu, Elizabeth S. Spelke, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tomer D. Ullman. CogSci 2020. [pdf]

• Modeling Expectation Violation in Intuitive Physics with Coarse Probabilistic Object Representations. Kevin Smith*, Lingjie Mei*, Shunyu Yao*, Jiajun Wu, Elizabeth S. Spelke, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tomer D. Ullman. NeurIPS 2019. [pdf] [code] [data] [project] [MIT news]

• 3D-aware Scene Manipulation via Inverse Graphics. Shunyu Yao*, Tzu-Ming Harry Hsu*, Jun-Yan Zhu, Jiajun Wu, Antonio Torralba, William T. Freeman, Joshua B. Tenenbaum. NeurIPS 2018. [pdf] [code] [project]